Blogs

I had a great time at the Friday reception at the Musée d'art Contemporain - loved the Geoffrey Farmer exhibit and had great discussion with Robin from New York and Floris from Amsterdam... here is a recent review of the exhibit:

http://www.gallerieswest.ca/Departments/ExhibitionReviews/6-107706.html 

Cheers,

The MUSE awards were announced at AAM this week, and the list represents an interesting overview of museum technology activity.

Here's a project that wasn't recognised [something that surprised me a bit]: The milti-touch tables at the Denver Art Museum.

david and i are completing an article for the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science .... it's got me wondering about what the 'general, intelligent reader' might want to know about museums and the web. 

i'm thinking we need to answer the following questions:

Given the interest in the search sessions at MW2008, and the follow-up discussion on Seb's, Nate's, and Brian's blogs, i though it would be useful to summarize a bit of the reading i've been doing lately for the phd + steve.museum research.

Directly relevant, is a longitudinal meta-study of the end-user search literature by Karen Markey, published in two parts in mid-2007 [in english, she compared and analysed the results of a lot of studies, conducted over a long time: 25 years].

here's the rationale -- and history -- behind my interest in the cc+ framework. something that i think museums should be looking seriously at. it was spurred by an exchange on the MCG list and still bears a bit of that context in its tone.

On Friday, 11th April, I held a mini-workshop together with Otmar Moritsch. We were showing how to use a software tool to create three-dimensional exhibitions.
Some of the audience were interested in the web site, so I thought I could use this way to give you the URL. Also comments of any kind are very much appreciated!

The website: http://www.exhibition3d.at

You will also have the possibility to download a demoversion of the tool!

Several people asked for a copy of my presentation, so here is a pdf of it.
Thanks for the attending/participating!

I was sitting at lunch today talking with new friends from the Museum World about why I, an "Orchestra" person was at a conference for Museums and the Web.   

Conference delegates attending Gail Durbin's workshop were given two minutes to complete the first part of a task and the roar of creative ideas being born was almost deafening

Semantic Webs - and The Rest of the World

While Ross Parry is facilitating our SW workshop (Friday,
12.30 till 1.30) at MW 2008, the digital museum community in the UK is carrying
on the debate Ross opened up for comment in the session.

Hi all, have been posting my notes to my Audience Research blog

Peter Samis, who works for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA), delighted the audience in Thursday morning’s Theoretical Frameworks session at mw2008. Peter’s overview of Take Your Time, a recent exhibition at SF MoMA of Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, was dazzling. I especially appreciated Peter's honesty about the good and bad news surrounding the museum’s attempt to mash up its voice with those of visitors.

I had some excellent conversations today at the Exhibitors Reception about Twitter and its application in the arts field.

Personally, I think Twitter is best used in conference settings, so I was hoping people could comment here and share their Twitter usernames so we can all follow each other during the conference and beyond.

My Twitter name is BStephenson. Follow me and I'll return the favor! 

As a *budding* young professional in this field, I've noticed a particular concept that is tossed around here and elsewhere in the field, and that is: once this last generation of conservatives literally dies out of the museum, we will all accept technology, we won't have to fight for our websites anymore--our curators will accept it too. This concept comes out in different situations. For example, an audience member says in response to a discussion on social media that his work at the history museum does not reach out to that kind of audience, so this model won't work for him. The response is that "well that won't always be the case, because eventually those people will go away and your new audience [of the same demographic] will be tech savvy."

Really?